Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Guest Post by Charles K. Alexander I: Yakov Sverdlov Named General Secretary of the Russian Communist Party

OTL, Bolshevik
Party day-to-day leader Yakov Sverdlov died on March 16, 1919, most
likely of influenza, but in this alternative, Sverdlov instead recovers
his health and is appointed the General Secretary of the Russian
Communist Party three years later, in place of Joseph Stalin.

For the
Information of Organizations and Members of the
RKP. April 3, 1922

Pravda, 4 April 1922.
The Central Committee elected by the XI
congress of the RKP has confirmed a secretariat
of the TsK RKP consisting of: Comrade Sverdlov
(general secretary), Comrade Sokolnikov and
Comrade Kuibyshev.
The secretariat of the TsK has established the
following schedule of reception hours at the
TsK, daily from 12:00 to 3:00 p.m.:
Monday-Sokolnikov and Kuibyshev,
Tuesday-Sverdlov and Sokolnikov,
Wednesday-Kuibyshev and Sokolnikov,
Thursday-Kuibyshev, Friday-Sverdlov and
Sokolnikov , Saturday-Sverdlov and Kuibyshev.
Address TsK: Vozdvizhenka, 5.
Secretary of the TsK RKP, Sverdlov.

Sverdlov's efforts were crucial in the slow but steady expansion of the
Bolshevik Party during the Russian Civil War, and especially so in
forestalling the deepening divisions of the party at it's Tenth Party
Congress in March 1921. The velvet glove to Lenin's iron fist, Sverdlov
was able to help Lenin win the debate over the Trade Union question
that had dominated internal party discussions for months, and the near
universal regard for his fairness in party matters meant that a proposal
to ban party factions except during pre-Congress discussion periods was
never brought forth at the Congress. In 1922, Sverdlov is appointed
general secretary of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the
Russian Communist Party along with two economists, Grigori Sokolnikov
and Valerian Kuybyshe, both of whom had also served as political
commissars in the Red Armies of the Civil War. The appointment
coincided with the general deterioration of Lenin's health and was
followed by a series of strokes suffered by the Bolshevik leader. While
insuring, sometimes ruthlessly, that Lenin got as much rest as
possible, at times even bullying Lenin in tandem with his wife,
Krupdskaya, Sverdlov also made sure that all factions within the party
maintained some level of contact with their acknowledged master. In his
final testament to the party, read at the Twelfth Party Congress in
April 1923 and published widely thereafter, Lenin drew brutally honest
sketches of the strengths and weaknesses of the various leaders of the
party, highlighting, for example, the sharpness both of Trotsky's mind
and his tongue, and recommended that Sverdlov serve as first among
equals within the leadership of the party. He also specifically
enjoined the party to resist the bureaucratism of the party and the
state, and humorously directed the party to not "make too much" of his
name after his death, and instead make sure that he received a "swift
and proper" burial.

Over the next several years, Sverdlov is able to defuse factional
struggles within the party and slowly open up the political life of the
country. Trotsky is shifted out of the army and his theoretical and
organizational strengths redirected toward the smart and systematic
rebuilding and expansion of Soviet manufacturing, and the largely
peaceful and gradual collectivization of agriculture. After the failure
of the German Revolution of 1923, Zinoviev is removed as leader of the
Comintern but retained his post as Party Leader in Petrograd, as Kamenev
was in Moscow. Stalin moves from one administrative role to another,
with mixed results, and is eventually dropped from the Politburo when he
accepts a position as a professor and administrator at Moscow State
University, where he becomes notorious for the petty political
infighting apparently endemic to academia the world over, and a steady
succession of pretty undergraduate interns and personal secretaries.

In 1927, as soon as Chiang Kai-shek turns on the Chinese working class
and peasantry, the CCP withdraws from the Kuomintang and launches an
uprising against Chiang with the full support of Moscow and the
Comintern. Backed by the small but strategically placed urban working
class and a significant portion of Chiang's military - much of the
officer corps had been trained by Soviet military specialists, and
besides recruiting many of the soldiers, CCP cadre had been in charge of
the army's political education - the CCP makes the crucial decision to
back peasant uprisings in the countryside instead of trying to tamp them
down. The showdown with Chiang, the hollow rump of the KMT. and the
landlords and bourgeoisie of South China is short, bloody and followed
by a CCP-led Northern Expedition that ultimately unites the nation.
European and Japanese military intervention is checked by Soviet troop
mobilizations on China's borders on the one hand and American diplomacy,
generously acknowledged and compensated, on the other. After ten long
years in the international wilderness, the Soviet leadership and party
membership is buoyed by the world's second successful proletarian
revolution, and the Soviet populace excited by their country's central
role in midwifing that revolution and in forcing the imperialist powers
to back down. This first crack in the Imperialist System is also
welcomed with excitement across the colonial and semi-colonial world.

With the confidence it imbibed from the successful Chinese Revolution,
the Soviet Communist Party in 1928 takes the important step of lifting
the Civil War ban on non-Communist parties loyal to the Soviet state,
allowing Left Menshevikks, Left Socialist Revolutionaries and assorted
anarchists and even left nationalists to openly organize and contest
elections to the Soviets or any other organs of state power, local,
regional or national. On maintaining the ban on anti-Soviet parties,
James P. Cannon, a representative of the American Communist Party
attending the 6th World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow in the
Summer of 1928, is quoted in the press to the effect that "just as
parties committed to the restoration of the American colonies to the
British Crown would not have been permitted in the first decades of the
United States of America, so parties advocating the restoration of
either czarism or capitalism could not be allowed in the still young
Soviet Union."

When Hitler is offered the post of Chancellor of Germany in 1933 the
German working class, Social Democratic and Communist, rises up and
prevents the Nazis from taking state power. The Nazis and other far
right elements, along with a significant portion of the German
bourgeoisie, are driven out of Germany after a short but sharp civil war
that turns into the world's third successful proletarian revolution,
the first in a heavily industrialized country. The Communist Party,
maintaining its political independence but supporting working class
unity in the civil war, comes to the fore as the reformist left
splinters, but the deep social democratic roots in the working class
result in the quick development of a multi-party, revolutionary and
proletarian democratic state. While German industrialists decide to
spend their hopefully brief exiles in Paris, London or Zürich, the
hardcore reactionaries, fascists and Nazis are concentrated in the
Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, Poland and, especially, Austria. The
Czechs largely succeed in disarming them, the Poles let them conduct
terrorist attacks across the border and are tempted to allow them to
launch a campaign into East Prussia, but their awful strategic position,
caught between Red Russia to the east and the new Red Germany to the
west, forces them to keep the leash on the German rightist exiles.

Austria is the most destabilized neighbor of revolutionary Germany, as
the exiled Nazis want to take state power to secure a solid base for
their campaign to win back Germany. The Conservative Party and
Austro-Fascists can find only one solution that will prevent the Nazis
from dragging a much-reduced Austria into another war in Germany, while
still keeping a lid on "Red Vienna" and the Austrian Social Democracy's
military arm, and give the bourgeoisie, petite bourgeoisie and
countryside a unifying and legitimately Austrian pole around which to
rally. Otto von Habsburg is invited to return to Austria as a
constitutional monarch, and while the dickering over whether he would
return as an Archduke or an Emperor nearly derailed the deal, he is able
to unite enough of the country - social democratic left to nationalist
right, farmers, workers and aristocrats - to militarily suppress the
Nazis, all without provoking either a revolutionary uprising in their
rear or Red German intervention. Otto thereby proves that even in a new
age of revolution, the Habsburgs still have the knack for coming out on
top.

Using lessons learned from the Chinese Revolution and its aftermath, and
with its Communist Party playing the goad, proletarian revolution also
succeeds in Spain in the mid- to late-1930's. The Spanish Left, while
still deeply divided between revolutionary Communists, reformist
Socialists and both revolutionary and reformist Anarcho-Syndicalists,
unites in declaring proletarian political independence from the liberal
and establishment backers of the bourgeois Republic and defeat the
center-right lash-up of Spanish Republicans and their Catholic,
nationalist, fascist and monarchist critics. The military is undercut
by the left's support for independence for Spain's African colonies, the
countryside is lost to the right with the left's backing of the
expropriation of the land by Spain's desperate peasants, and where
France's Popular Front dithers, the Soviet Union, Germany and China
provide the revolutionaries with more aid than Mussolini's fascist Italy
and Britain's Tories can muster for the Republic and its
counter-revolutionary attack dogs. As international volunteers from the
left and right join their respective Spanish allies on the frontlines,
the final act of Germany's civil war is played out on the Spanish plain,
with hundreds of Nazis and more than a thousand other German rightists
losing their lives in support of Spanish reaction.

Twenty years after the October Revolution, with a capitalist world still
deep in the throes of the Great Depression, there exists a Soviet Union
with a rapidly expanding economy and a steadily broadening political
sphere, a stabilizing revolutionary Germany with a somewhat chaotic but
vibrant proletarian "Council Communist" republic, a Spain flying the Red
and Black flag at the end of its Civil War, and a reunified China
industrializing with the help of Soviet and German experts, re-writing
the rules of its relationships with the imperialist powers that had
carved it up, inspiring colonial and semi-colonial peoples everywhere,
and arming itself in case the European powers and America decide to back
Imperial Japan in a play to roll back the revolutionary tide and grab
China's resources, thereby - just as an afterthought, of course -
distracting resource-poor Japan from their own Asian and Pacific
colonies and territories.

All this because the nearly forgotten Yakov Sverdlov survived the flu
(or was it typhus, TB or an anti-Bolshevik attack?) in March 1919 and
remained in charge of the day-to-day operations of the Bolshevik Party
long enough for the Civil War to end, the revolution to get some
breathing room, and the bureaucracy and its creature, Stalin, to be
strangled in its crib and kept from seizing and corrupting the Party,
the Revolution, the Soviet Union, the international Communist movement
and ultimately, the very idea of revolutionary change.